Meloni-project krijgt klap door sombere economische groeivoorspellingen

Yet the telling moment came after the press had left, when the topic turned to Ukraine’s war with Russia. Whatever it takes.” Because Italy is one of the world’s wealthiest countries and is a founding member of the European Union, the nationalism she unleashes stands to influence where Western democracy heads next. It is a quirk of history that Meloni is fashioning a 21st century nationalism in the country that embodied the liberalizing 19th century version through its unification and, in Mussolini, created the catastrophic Fascist model in the 20th.

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And the closer you get to what you have in poor old America, where there is no center.” “In Germany and in Italy and in France, and in Portugal and in Romania, the center holds. By knitting together the array of right-wing blocs in Italy, critics say, Meloni may unleash forces that her nation and Europe as a whole have long fought to keep in check. Agenda items that receive support from the electorate and in Parliament can take years to enact, and by then the country’s famously ephemeral governments often have changed.

Giorgia Meloni

But opposition groups argue that denying young people exposure to basic sex education keeps the country grounded in its patriarchal past. The live-streamed murder of two women and a girl has shocked Argentina Official figures show that birth rates dropped by 6.3% in the first seven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, and that some Italian women earn up to 40% less than men in the same jobs. Critics question whether she has done enough since to tackle increasing rates of violence against women in the country, or challenge persistent inequality in the workplace. Four more women have been killed since Genini, according to the group, including Luciana Ronchi, 62, and 80-year-old Vanda Venditti.

When the nation united behind a caretaker government during the COVID-19 crisis, Meloni declined to support it. She built a national reputation by running for mayor of Rome while pregnant with her daughter in 2016. In 2004, at age 27, she won the leadership of the youth group of the party, which had renamed itself the National Alliance. But at youth meetings and rallies, she emerged as an effective orator and political operator.

Italy has a femicide problem. Critics say Prime Minister Georgia Meloni should do more to fix it

“I’m seeing a focus on international affairs instead,” she told CNN. She had hoped a female leader would see the bind many young, employable women seem to be in. “If I were to start a family on a temporary contract, I wouldn’t get my maternity leave paid, I wouldn’t get my job back, and I couldn’t afford childcare even if I did have a job to go back to,” she said. New York became ‘too crazy’ so she moved to an Italian village, met her husband and started a family Ricci, who graduated from the prestigious Bocconi University in Milan, also studied overseas but says she wants to stay in Italy and be successful there, raise a family and own her own home. Instead, proposed plans to build day-care centers were slashed from her first budget.

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• Her critics say, however, that she has done little to help provide affordable child care options, despite campaign promises ahead of the 2022 election that launched her to power.
• “You can smell when someone’s a political animal,” says one Brussels-based diplomat who watched her work the halls of the E.U.
• When the nation united behind a caretaker government during the COVID-19 crisis, Meloni declined to support it.
• “They’re doing the same things in all the states that are ruled now by the extreme right,” says Elly Schlein, leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party.

Meloni, with an eye on elections that were scheduled for 2023, tried to distance the party from its fascist origins. Again, the Brothers of Italy opted to remain in opposition; they were the only major party to chicken road app do so. Although the Brothers of Italy were part of a coalition with the League, they did not join the Conte government. In the 2018 general election, the Brothers of Italy captured just 4 percent of the vote, but this still marked an enormous improvement on the party’s 2013 showing.

• Her fiercest political critics acknowledge her tangible turn to the center.
• She held that post until 2002, when her political fortunes were buoyed by the return to power of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.
• Elly Schlein, the leader of Italy’s main opposition Democratic Party, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Meloni government’s record on women’s issues.
• What is unsettling about Meloni is not so much her behavior as her accommodation of the forces that nationalism has unleashed in the past, at a moment when postwar norms are fading away.

“If you look at the way other authoritarian leaders behave, they are incremental,” says Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna. From Portugal to Romania, once ostracized extremists on the far right are overtaking traditional conservative parties, much like the MAGA movement in the U.S. On the international stage, she has behaved less like a right-wing revolutionary than a pragmatic conservative.

Founding the Brothers of Italy

She held that post until 2002, when her political fortunes were buoyed by the return to power of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. Meloni’s father left her family when she was a child, and Meloni was raised by her mother in the working-class neighborhood of Garbatella in central Rome. “The pressure not to have children is strong, the pressure to work outside the home, to give up the dream of having a family, to just get a dog instead, is hard to fight.” “I feel like I have permission to be a mother,” Costa told CNN, explaining that she had felt pressure growing up to have a career over family, or at least start her career first before thinking about becoming a mother.

Where Giorgia Meloni Is Leading Europe

Meloni’s startup party, Fratelli d’Italia—named for the first lines of the country’s national anthem—began life with 2% support. Two years after that, she was named Minister for Youth in the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi. “We are the heirs of the right-wing party,” says Meloni’s top political adviser Giovanbattista Fazzolari. That has presented a crisis for centrist European governments whose populations for decades after World War II shunned far-right parties. As Meloni was the only major opposition figure to Draghi’s government, the right-wing parties unified around her in the months leading up to the elections. The party’s name was taken from the opening verse of the Italian national anthem, and its logo incorporated the tricolour flame originally used by the MSI.

As a single mother who supports the traditional family, she has insisted that it is “ridiculous” to accuse her of not doing enough for women. Meloni wants a system with stronger executive power, and she advocates for a democratic model that can accommodate parties on the far right instead of gatekeeping. After World War II, Italy’s political system was restructured to be hard to govern, heavily weighted to parliamentary power at the expense of the executive.

It’s late afternoon on July 4 in Rome’s Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Italian government, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is walking the marble-floored halls. The following day Meloni became Italy’s first female prime minister, and she led Italy’s first far-right government since World War II. In the weeks following the elections, Meloni finalized the composition of her cabinet, and on October 21, 2022, Mattarella officially invited her to form a government. Under the motto “Italy and Italians first,” Meloni became the face of a political bloc that included Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s League. Draghi led Italy out of the worst days of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but traditional political rivalries soon reasserted themselves, and his fragile coalition imploded.

The budding partnership has led to speculation that Meloni and her far-right allies may eventually usurp power from the more traditional conservative bloc in Brussels, just as she has united the center and far-right parties in Italy. The Belt and Road move, the aide says, was “very welcome.” Across the West, left-of-center leaders concluded that in power, she had become a traditional European conservative. Meloni lost, but by 2018 the party had won dozens of seats in Parliament and rejoined a center-right alliance. “We were seen sometimes as a sort of danger, sort of communist group inside the right-wing party.” At night, they regularly went out around Rome to put up posters, often confronting opposing groups from the political left doing the same thing. The party was not popular, least of all with young people from a left-leaning section of Rome. The remaining major parties failed to coalesce into any kind of meaningful coalition; the centre-left Democratic Party explicitly ruled out an alliance with the Five Star Movement, and Matteo Renzi’s moderate Third Pole struggled to keep the Draghi agenda alive.

The National Alliance and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia formalized their coalition under the banner of the People of Freedom (Popolo della Libertà; PdL) in 2007, and the PdL swept into power in snap elections held in April 2008. The National Alliance would serve as a coalition partner in several Berlusconi governments in the 2000s, and Meloni was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Italian parliament, in 2006. In 1998 Meloni was elected as a councillor to the provincial government of Rome. She held a variety of leadership positions in Youth Action before being elected president of the group in 2004.

” Meloni’s rising political stature was recognized by other European populist parties in 2020, when she was named president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a Euroskeptic bloc within the European Parliament. Other populist parties boasted strong performances, and a government was eventually formed under Giuseppe Conte by the left-leaning Euroskeptic Five Star Movement and the right-wing formerly secessionist League. When you cut welfare, schools, and funding for services for people with disabilities, the burden of care falls on families, and within families, on women.” The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Report ranks Italy 85th out of 148 countries on issues like economic participation and opportunity, education, health, and political empowerment. Ariana Ricci, a 32-year-old human resources manager, voted for Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy party in 2022, hoping she would prioritize efforts to tackle wage disparity, reproductive rights, and women’s safety. Her critics say, however, that she has done little to help provide affordable child care options, despite campaign promises ahead of the 2022 election that launched her to power.

Even many on the Italian left acknowledge that 80 years after the fall of Fascism, it is time for reform. This is her political strength in European terms. Meloni has also forged an alliance with von der Leyen, who leaned on Meloni to stabilize Europe’s relations with Trump after his opening trade-war salvos. She has tried to expand the Prime Minister’s powers and passed a security bill that limits some kinds of protest and expands punishment for others.

“We were a strange group,” says Nicola Procaccini, who now leads Meloni’s party in the European Parliament in Brussels. The fire set the family on a harder course. When the fire brigade came, “they destroyed what was left of our poor apartment,” Arianna says. After his departure, the family lived in a nice apartment in a well-to-do Roman neighborhood. Their father abandoned the family to sail around the world, ended up living in the Canary Islands, and was reportedly later convicted in Spanish court for drug smuggling.